Canonicalization Made Simple

February 14th, 2007

by Patricia Fusco

Originally published in ClickZ

P J Fusco, lead strategist with Netconcepts highlights canonicalization, “the process of converting data that has more than one possible representation into a ‘standardized’ canonical representation.” Easy, right?

To put this into an clearer context, canonicalization is the process that search engines take to choose the cleanest URLs to display in the SERPs.

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SEO: Can Wikipedia Help Your Business?

February 12th, 2007

by Stephan Spencer

Originally published in Practical Ecommerce

In Google, Wikipedia is everywhere. Pretty much anything you type into Google seems to result in a Wikipedia entry being returned as a top-10 result. Wikipedia’s status in the search engines as an “authority site” is undisputed. Those lucky, well-connected, skillful or famous enough to be cited enjoyed the benefits of Wikipedia’s unique “golden link effect.” Then a new policy instituted in January changed all that. As a countermeasure to thwart spammers competing in an SEO contest, all external links within Wikipedia were “nofollowed.” This effectively cut off the outward flow of “link juice” (PageRank) to websites referenced in Wikipedia…

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Website Critique: Putting Jegs.com in Drive

February 1st, 2007

by Stephan Spencer and David Fry

This website critique was conducted by David Fry and Stephan Spencer. David Fry focused on the site’s content and functionality while Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts, tested Jegs.com’s search capabilities.

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SERPs and the Super Bowl

January 31st, 2007

by Patricia Fusco

Originally published in ClickZ

Can SERPs predict the outcome of Super Bowl XLI? Lead Strategist with Netconcepts, PJ Fusco keeps score as three major search engines tell all.

Looking only at indexation, back-links, result snippets, on-page content references, and engine popularity, MSN, Yahoo and Google are put to the ultimate Nostradamus Super Bowl test. Will Yahoo and Google level the playing field or will MSN come up with a flea-flicker at the last second?

Who will emerge triumphant in this battle of the Super Bowl SERPs? Click here to see PJ’s results.

SEO Best Practices: 20 Questions

January 17th, 2007

by Patricia Fusco

Originally published in ClickZ

How can you tell if your site adheres to SEO best practices? Lead Strategist with Netconcepts, PJ Fusco says you start by answering these 20 questions honestly. In an article for ClickZ, she starts out by asking if the keywords you are targeting relevant to your site content. After all, SEO best practice is all about embracing such essential elements like ensuring identical content is visible to both users and search engine spiders, and more. And when you’re done with answering those 20 questions, Pat goes on to adviseâ?¦

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SEO Report Card: FreshPair.com

January 2nd, 2007

by Stephan Spencer

Originally published in Practical Ecommerce

This month, letâ??s sneak a peek at FreshPair (www.freshpair.com), an underwear etailer, and a small sampling of its backlinks. We will discover thier secret for recieving high search engine rankings for such sought after trophy terms as “panties,” “bras,” and “underwear.” However, its possible, their secrets are better kept in the top drawer.

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Beneath the Surface of Search

January 1st, 2007

by Brian Klais

Originally published in Multichannel Merchant

Itâ??s 2007 already. If you are like most merchants, youâ??ve followed the advice of your NSO firm and completed some basic site optimization projects. You routinely spot check your Google indexation, and your rankings on 100 or so â??trophyâ?? keywords to show your executive team. And a look at your web analytics shows your natural search channel sales growing. So whatâ??s wrong with this picture?
Let the Long Tail of natural search and KPI metrics strengthen your website through best practice SEO.

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SEO: To Buy Links, or Not to Buy Links?

January 1st, 2007

by Stephan Spencer

Originally published in Practical Ecommerce

If Google engineer Matt Cutts had his druthers, buying links would become an extinct SEO practice.

Cutts has addressed the topic of link-buying on a number of occasions on his blog (Mattcutts.com/blog) and in blog comments elsewhere. He’s admonished webmasters who buy links for PageRank and encouraged webmasters instead to buy only links that have been “nofollowed” — in other words, where the rel=nofollow attribute has been added to the link so that the search engines do not count that link as a vote. He has stated in no uncertain terms that Google considers “buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside our quality guidelines.”

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Site architecture and SEO

December 20th, 2006

by Patricia Fusco

Originally published in ClickZ

You have to crawl before you can run says P J Fusco, lead strategist with Netconcepts who highlights that before creating keyword-targeted content, you must make that additional content manageable. “Before we can direct the search engine spiders toward prominent content, we must have the ability to create natural hierarchy for page content,” she says. PJ goes on to highlight inhibitors and disrupters to this natural flow in this article for ClickZ.

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Search’s Long Tail and SEO

November 22nd, 2006

by Patricia Fusco

Originally published in ClickZ

The long tail isn’t a threat to branded search, but a well rounded unbranded complement to natural search engine referrals. However, it’s much easier said than done says PJ Fusco, lead strategist with Netconcepts in this article for ClickZ – unless, of course, the site’s content management structure or e-commerce platform has been built on a blog-like publishing system. Many corporate and e-commerce sites are the antithesis of blogs, she goes on to sayâ?¦

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